A groundbreaking exploration of how women survive—and carry—the lasting impact of sexual trauma from award-winning New York Times Magazine writer Jen Percy

“Impossibly beuatiful...Girls Play Dead is a vital continuation of [the effort] 'to tell true stories of women’s lives,' in such breadth and definition that the justice system finally has to acknowledge what it’s been obscuring.” —Sophie Gilbert, The Atlantic

“Girls Play Dead reads like a novel, exquisitely rendered, and a kind of geography, mapping out the complexities of women’s experiences going ‘down below’ and the specific ways that they come to understand their altered bodies and minds.”
—Rachel Aviv, New York Times bestselling author of Strangers to Ourselves

After a childhood spent learning survival strategies in the wilderness, Jen Percy thought she knew how she would respond in the face of danger. But a series of unsettling interactions with men left her feeling betrayed and confounded by her body's passivity. Forced to reckon the myths of her own empowerment, Percy set off a broader inquiry into the way fear shapes behavior in the context of sexual violence, including the strange behaviors of three generations of women in her family.

Drawing on original reporting, years of conversations with survivors, and her own life story, Percy explores the surprising ways in which responses to sexual violence are shaped by both evolutionary instinct and gendered scripts. She takes on taboo subjects—orgasms during assault, sexual promiscuity, female rage, freezing and passivity—illuminating how society misreads these acts as deviance or consent, rather than brilliant acts of self-preservation.

Like Joan Didion, Katherine Boo, and Janet Malcolm, Percy is a fearless cultural critic with a talent for wresting deep truths from lived experiences. Girls Play Dead meaningfully expands the language available to survivors and complicates our expectations of how a trauma story should sound—especially when belief, justice, and healing are contingent on how well a story “makes sense.” Percy examines how trauma corrupts storytelling itself, making survivors’ accounts seem fractured or surreal—and therefore less credible to institutions demanding coherence—resulting in an ambitious testament to the mind as a record of resilience.